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Same Old Shit: Obama, Israel Agree to ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Policy on East Jerusalem Settlements

Israel seems to be the only reason for the  existence of America.  We’re nothing but their poodle for this Zionist nation of spies, and ingrates. They aren’t worth it.

Obama, Israel Agree to ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Policy on East Jerusalem Settlements

By Jason Ditz On March 18, 2010 

After last week’s announced settlement expansion effectively torpedoed the indirect peace talks with the Palestinian Authority, the Israeli government is will to do almost anything to build “trust,” so long as it doesn’t involve the only thing the PA actually wants, abandoning that settlement expansion.

Now, Israel has reportedly reached an agreement with the Obama Administration on something called a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. In short, Israel would continue to expand settlements in occupied East Jerusalem with impunity, but they wouldn’t make a big deal of announcing those expansions in the press.

Further, officials say that the Netanyahu government could make some serious gestures to the PA, including the removal of certain West Bank checkpoints and the release of some Palestinian detainees.

But while Netanyahu seems to want to fix the rift with the United States, at least so long as it doesn’t require anything more than nominal gestures, other members of his coalition seem to still be spoiling for a fight. The Shas Party’s official journal today condemned President Obama as a ’stone throwing Palestinian.’ While this sort of rhetoric would normalize be easy to brush off, Shas leader Eli Yishai was actually responsible for last week’s settlement announcement, and is still in a position to torpedo any rapprochement if he is so inclined.

URL to article: http://news.antiwar.com/2010/03/18/israel-eyes-trust-building-moves-without-stopping-settlement-growth/

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By JDavis – March 19, 2010

The Truth About American and Israeli Interests Comes Out

The costs of carrying Israel are not worth it. From the USS Liberty, Jonathan Pollard,  AIPAC, Ben Kadish, Larry Franklin spies the lies, US military technology transfers to China the hundreds of billions given to them, JINSA,  PNAC, the neoconservative lies,   fighting their wars and enemies,  carrying their water at the UN and around the world, suffering their ungratefulness, trustworthiness and the self righteous racism and apartheid of entitlement above all others because the victims of Jewish exceptionalism are simply goyim aka “cattle”.

Why?

The Truth About American and Israeli Interests Comes Out

Posted By William Pfaff On March 17, 2010 

PARIS — The relationship between the United States and Israel has always rested on a number of pretensions, politically useful to politicians on both sides, but because they are untrue, certain eventually to prove destructive to both countries.

The destruction has now begun, as the pretensions and hypocrisies begin to fall. The cause of this is external and unexpected. Preoccupied with its own interests, and by the expansionist forces inside its society of secular Zionism, expressed in the Likud Party, and the equivalent expansionism motivated by millenarian religion, the Benjamin Netanyahu government has made itself an obstacle to American military security and to the interests of U.S. military forces operating in the Islamic world.

This has been obvious for many years but has only now been acknowledged by military commanders. As Mark Perry has reported on the Foreign Policy magazine Web site, a team dispatched by Gen. David Petraeus of Central Command briefed the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Jan. 16 to the effect that the conduct of Israel with respect to the Palestinians has now caused the Islamic forces cooperating with the United States, as well as those fighting it, to conclude that the U.S. is weak, and its military posture is subverted by American complicity with Israel’s intransigence on the Palestinian issue.

When this was conveyed to the White House, the shock was great. The message itself was not so much a surprise as the emphasis and urgency with which senior American commanders now regard the problem.

This lies behind the fury of White House officials, Vice President Joseph Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week at the deliberate humiliation of the United States by the Netanyahu government in making the vice president’s visit to Israel the occasion for the announcement of the construction of 1,600 new residence units in East Jerusalem, in areas claimed by the Palestinians and in international law belonging to them. The Israeli prime minister added personal defiance to these announcements, regretting their “timing” but refusing to accept the American protests as valid.

Relations between the two countries, and the foreign-policy dialogue within both countries, have both for many years rested upon a very large dose of hypocrisy.

On Sept. 29, 2008, Ethan Brommer wrote in The New York Times, “(Outgoing) Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in an interview . . . that Israel must withdraw from nearly all of the West Bank as well as East Jerusalem to attain peace with the Palestinians.” This indeed had long been obvious to all realistic Israeli and American political observers, yet Mr. Olmert, a veteran Israeli politician, allowed himself to say this only after his political career had ended.

Ariel Sharon carried out the forced evacuation of Jewish settlers in Gaza for the same reason. He said Israel could not expect indefinitely to rule over a Palestinian population larger than the Israeli population. He was not long after struck down. (There undoubtedly are Orthodox rabbis who believe this the act of an outraged Old Testament God, converted to Zionism — originally a secular creed). Sharon remains in a coma.

Now Benjamin Netanyahu has provoked what the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. calls the worst crisis between the two countries in three decades.

Until now, successive Israeli governments pretended to the world community that its land seizures from the Palestinians would all be peacefully sorted out in a final two-states agreement (if one occurred!). The United States pretended that this was true, and that in the meantime its formal, legal refusal to acknowledge Israel’s claims on Jerusalem and on the Palestinian territories provided a substitute for a foreign policy.

The most important and dangerous pretence has been that American and Israeli interests in the Middle East coincide. They actually conflict in basic respects. The American interest in the region is permanent good relations with the oil-producing Arab states, which remain in doubt so long as the Palestine question is unresolved.

The American interest with respect to Israel is permanent peace between it and its neighbors. The obstacle to this is the unwillingness of most Islamic governments to recognize the legitimacy of the Israeli state within its present borders, so long as there is no agreement with the Palestinians. Until then, (as the Pentagon briefers said), the present enmity of Muslims, particularly in the Middle East and South Asia, toward the United States must be expected to mount, and the wars of the United States against Muslim groups will be seen as imperialist war against Islam.

Israel at present is unable to define what it really wants (even if it could have it) because its people are divided in interpreting their nation’s permanent interest. There is an alliance of expansionist secular Zionists with that part of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community that believes that God, in the Book of Genesis, gave his people the land from the Nile to the Euphrates. They have no way at present to fulfill this prophecy, but they are patient. The vast majority of Israelis would probably welcome a settlement with the Arabs that assured them permanent security within their present frontiers — if only they could have that. They presumably can — under another government.

The annual conference of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee is scheduled for next week. Prime Minister Netanyahu and Secretary of State Clinton are both expected to speak. It will be an interesting occasion.

Read more by William Pfaff

URL to article: http://original.antiwar.com/pfaff/2010/03/17/the-truth-about-american-and-israeli-interests-comes-out/

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By JDavis – March 18, 2010

Israel as an ally is debatable. It cost the US billions annualy and thousands of US lives to fight Israel’s enemies and agendas and for what? …so no Israeli Jew will die in the Global War on Terror they inflame?. They lie, they spy, they insult, their actions endagers US troops. ISRAEL IS NOT WORTH IT

How many IDF troops and pilots have been lost since 9-11?  ZERO. We cab’t even get a fricking “thank you” from these ingrates and leeches who don’t give a damn about America and never have unless there’s something in it for them and it always costs the US taxpayers plenty. To hell with these “Israel First” fifth colomnists and apologists.

Israel vs. America: Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

Posted By Justin Raimondo On March 16, 2010 @ 11:00 pm In Uncategorized | 2 Comments

The brouhaha over what Hillary Clinton said was Israel’s calculated “insult” to the United States is escalating into what many characterize as a “crisis” in US-Israeli relations, a turning point in which the terms of the “special relationship” are about to undergo a major change. When Joe Biden berated his hosts for making the settlements announcement as he arrived on Israeli soil, it was as if a light bulb went off over his head:

“This is starting to get dangerous for us,” Biden is reported to have said. “What you’re doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That endangers us and it endangers regional peace.”

“Starting to get dangerous for us”? I find it difficult to believe this is the first time anyone in Washington has noticed the chief strategic consequence of the Iraq war, and that is what might be called the umbrella effect. Due to the heavy US presence in Iraq, the Mediterranean, and the Persian Gulf, Israel feels empowered to push a brazenly expansionist agenda. The umbrella effect was a key reason why the Israel lobby pushed hard for the invasion and occupation of Iraq: it put US soldiers in between the Israelis and their multifold enemies in the region.

Whether that was the intention all along is largely irrelevant. Ensconced smack dab in the middle of the Arab world, our troops were and are sitting ducks, useful to the Israelis because their presence diverts Arab anger and retaliation away from Israel and toward other targets – namely, American soldiers in Iraq.

Furthermore, the inevitable consequence of the invasion was to place US soldiers in a position where they could be dragged in to a wider war in the Middle East on Israel’s behalf. The conquest of Iraq implied a continuing and wider effort by the US to “transform” the region, a conflict that would, not so coincidentally, improve Israel’s position, and indeed this was the rhetoric employed by the Bush administration and its supporters in the run-up to the Iraq war.

The news that it was General David Petraeus, CENTCOM commander and author of the Iraq “surge,” who raised the alarm over the regional consequences of Israeli intransigence back in January, is indicative of a point I have long made in this space: that ever since 9/11, objective circumstances required a US tilt away from Israel. That the impetus for a policy change is coming from Petraeus underscores the objective nature of the conditions forcing US policymakers to confront what has by now become a serious military problem.

Unfortunately for Petraeus and the US officer corps, this is a major domestic political problem for the Obama administration, which is loath to take on the Israel lobby – and with good reason. Which is why they’re backpedaling furiously, and denying Biden ever said or meant what he clearly did mean and did say.

The outcry in Congress, from Democrats as well as Republicans, in Israel’s defense has been almost comical in its outlandish support for a foreign country over one’s own: a kind of inverse Bizarro-patriotism of the sort that we haven’t seen since US leftists waved the flag of the National Liberation Front at antiwar rallies during the Vietnam era. The big difference being that this fifth column is enormously successful and influential, motivating Democrats to denounce a President and an administration of their own party, and orchestrating such an outcry that the Pentagon and the State Department will be forced to back down.

In any conflict between objective reality and political reality, when it comes to foreign policy the latter is bound to win out. That is why Israel and its lobby in America have invested so many resources into influencing US public opinion, and, more than that, setting the parameters of the debate – such as it is – over US policy in the Middle East, and US relations with the Jewish state.

The long arm of the Israelis reaches directly into the US via an active and well-funded lobby, which reflexively defends the actions of the Israeli government and seeks to discredit the Palestinian cause in every venue. Up until recently it was impossible to say this without being called all sorts of nasty names. More recently, however, while the nastiness has if anything escalated, the smear brigade is less successful at driving their opponents to the margins of public discourse. Objective reality – otherwise known as the truth – matters. Dead US soldiers whose demise could have been prevented matter greatly – and that somber reality can be masked by propaganda and “spin” only so long.

General Petraeus is concerned with the safety of his troops, and so it was the military that took the lead in this instance. Unfortunately, this is one battle that the politicians are none too eager to fight, and my guess is that this crisis will pass – although of course it will continue to bubble underground, periodically coming to the surface at key junctures, reminding our “leaders” that reality always has the last word.

Military and strategic imperatives demand a rupture, or at least a radical divergence, between the US and Israel: political reality forbids it. As the old song puts it: something’s gotta give.

Read more by Justin Raimondo

URL to article: http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2010/03/16/breaking-up-is-hard-to-do/

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By JDavis – March 17, 2010

Rep. Ron Paul: Supporting the War Instead of the Troops

Supporting the War Instead of the Troops

Posted By Rep. Ron Paul On March 15, 2010

Last week, Congress debated a resolution directing the president to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan no later than the end of this year. The Constitution gives the power to declare war to the Congress, so it is clearly appropriate for Congress to assert its voice on matters of armed conflict. In recent decades, however, Congress has defaulted on this most critical duty, essentially granting successive presidents the unilateral (and clearly unconstitutional) power to begin and end wars at will. This resolution was not expected to pass; however, the ensuing debate and floor vote served some very important purposes.

First, it was important to finally have an actual floor debate on the merits and demerits of continuing our involvement in the conflict in Afghanistan. Most congressional action regarding Afghanistan has concerned continued funding for the conflict. Thus, members of Congress have cloaked their support for an increasingly unpopular war in terms of financial support of the troops. But last week’s resolution had nothing to do with funding or defunding the war, but rather dealt directly with the wisdom of an open-ended commitment of U.S. troops (and hundreds of billions of tax dollars) in Afghanistan. Members opposing the resolution had to make their case for the ongoing loss of American lives as well as the huge expenditures required for an intractable conflict.

In my opinion, this was an impossible case to make.

Supporters of the war made the same intellectually weak arguments for continuing our occupation of a nation with a long and bloody history of resisting foreign occupation. Ultimately, the war supporters in Congress prevailed in the vote on the resolution. Still, the vote was significant because it places every member of Congress on the record as supporting or not supporting the unconstitutional, costly, violent occupation of a country that never attacked us. This vote should serve as an important reminder to the American people of where their representatives really stand when it comes to policing the world, empire-building, and war.

The War Powers Resolution was passed in 1973 in the aftermath of Vietnam. It was intended to prevent presidents from slipping this country so easily into unwinnable wars, wars with indistinct enemies and vague goals. Unfortunately, it has had the opposite effect by literally legalizing undeclared wars for 90 days. In the case of Afghanistan, 90 days has stretched into nearly a decade. The original purpose of the initial authorization of force – to pursue those responsible for the attacks on September 11 – is no longer applicable. Al-Qaeda has left Afghanistan; we are now pursuing the Taliban, who never attacked us. The Taliban certainly are not our friends, but the more of them we kill, the more their ranks grow and the stronger they become. Meanwhile, we are spending hundreds of billions of dollars in Afghanistan and accelerating our plunge toward national bankruptcy. Whose interests do we serve by continuing this exercise in futility?

Osama bin Laden has said many times that his strategy was to bankrupt America by forcing us into protracted fighting in the mountains of Afghanistan. The Soviet Union learned this lesson the hard way and ultimately was forced to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan in defeat and humiliation. This same fate may await us unless we rethink our policy and resist any escalation of our military efforts in Afghanistan. Our troops should be used for defending our country, making us safer and stronger at home – not for occupying foreign nations with no real strategy or objective.

Read more by Rep. Ron Paul

URL to article: http://original.antiwar.com/paul/2010/03/15/supporting-the-war-instead-of-the-troops/

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Posted in Constitutional, General, Intervention, Legal, Military, Neoconservatism.

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By JDavis – March 16, 2010

How to Defend Non-Interventionist Foreign Policy

A national debate sorely needed. Where is the MSM?

How to Defend Non-Interventionist Foreign Policy

Thu, 03/11/2010 by David Carlson

Over the past few weeks I have had quite a few conversations with Conservatives which have led to a debate about interventionist versus non-interventionist foreign policy.  It usually starts with them attacking Ron Paul for one reason or another (check out this article on Midwest Spin for an example).  After I respond and question their criticism, it usually ends up being their disagreement with his foreign policy.

Foreign policy can be a very complex topic. I think that non-interventionists, for the most part, know why they support that policy much better than your typical interventionist. Many interventionists do not even understand the difference between non-intervention and isolationist.

If you support non-intervention you either have found yourself in a debate and had to defend non-intervention, or you will find yourself in one sometime in the near future. I have found there are a few things to keep in mind when you are in these debates:

1) Be ready to explain the difference between non-interventionism and isolationism. Isolationism is the foreign policy of North Korea. Non-intervention involves open dialogue, free trade, and minding your own business overseas. Two vastly different approaches. Just because you don’t support having a global military empire does not mean you are an isolationist.

2) Know some facts and figures. The United States has over 700 permanent military bases spread out across over 100 nations. Roughly 20% of the federal budget is military expenditures. There are facts and figures that give proof that 1) our military expenditures are financially unsustainable and 2) we most certainly have a foreign policy of intervention and global imperialism.

3) Be Ready to talk 9/11. Ask the interventionist why they think we were attacked. If they say it is because we are a free and prosperous nation, ask us how they expect us to be in perpetual warfare? By that logic, there will always be terrorists trying to attack us (unless we become a socialistic nation). Should we just constantly be fighting over seas until the end of time? Then explain the non-interventionist viewpoint: we were attacked here because we have been over there for over half a century; meddling in their affairs and maintaining a troop presence. Be absolutely sure to cite Chalmers Johnson’s great book Blowback and Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins. There are many more books on the subject you can cite, just make sure you read them!

4) Prepare for a frustrating conversation. Oftentimes, at least in my own experience, the interventionist will refuse to defend their view. If they say they don’t have time ask if there is a time in the future they will be able to talk. If they are on twitter and say they can’t discuss such a complex topic give them your email and say you would love to move the conversation to that. They may just end up making it about Ron Paul and how he has no chance of winning President. Explain you are interested in interventionism versus non-interventionism, not Ron Paul. One day Ron Paul will pass away and the discussion will have to move to his policies, not the man.

5) Remember your goal. Your goal is to start a dialogue and hopefully make the other party question their views, or at least create some sort of cognitive dissonance. They might not turn from interventionists to non-interventionists overnight, but they should start thinking a little harder about why they are interventionists. Present your views, question theirs, and defend your points.

Never be scared about talking foreign policy. The only reason there would be to not discuss it or try to avoid discussing it would be if you are not certain your view is better. If you don’t think your view is better, the responsible thing would be to figure out what you really believe! If your view is better, you have nothing to fear.

Good luck!

http://www.unitedliberty.org/articles/5240-how-to-defend-non-interventionist-foreign-policy

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By JDavis – March 15, 2010

Who’s to blame for the Iraq war? A not-so-trivial quiz

The consequences of having an Israel First Zionist foreign policy. Also how many soldiers and pilots has Israel lost in the Global War on Terror? How many billions did Israel expend to remove their mortal enemy? Israel is an untrustworthy du[licitious ally of all costs and no real benefits.

Israel isn't worth it.  It all started June 8, 1967. It's been a disaster ever since.

Who’s to blame for the Iraq war?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A not-so-trivial quiz
By Maidhc Ó Cathail

14 March 2010

Maidhc Ó Cathail names and shames the top 19 politicians, academics and policy makers – all con men and all Zionist Jews – who lied and conspired to steer the US towwards aggression against the Iraqi people.

This month marks the seventh anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Despite the passage of time, there is still much confusion, some of it deliberate, about why America made that fateful decision. The following questions are intended to clarify who’s to blame for the Iraq war.

1. Ahmed Chalabi, the source of much of the false “intelligence” about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, was introduced to his biggest boosters, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz ,by their mentor, a University of Chicago professor who had known the Iraqi conman since the 1960s. Who was this influential Cold War hawk who has an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) conference centre named in his honour?

2. In 1982, “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s” appeared in Kivunim, a journal published by the World Zionist Organization, which stated: “Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel’s targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel.” Who wrote this seminal article?

3. “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” a report prepared for Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in 1996, recommended “removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right”. Which then member of the Pentagon’s Defence Policy Board was the study group leader?

4. A November 1997 Weekly Standard editorial entitled “Saddam Must Go” stated: “We know it seems unthinkable to propose another ground attack to take Baghdad. But it’s time to start thinking the unthinkable.” The following year, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), an influential neo-conservative think tank, published a letter to President Clinton urging war against Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein because he is a “hazard” to “a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil”. The co-founders of PNAC were also the authors of the “Saddam Must Go” editorial. Who are they?

5. In Tyranny’s Ally: America’s Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein, published by AEI Press in 1999, he argued that Clinton policies in Iraq were failing to contain the country and proposed that the US use its military to redraw the map of the Middle East. Who was this Middle East adviser to Vice-President Dick Cheney from 2003 to mid-2007?

6. On 15 September 2001 at Camp David, the deputy defence secretary attempted to justify a US attack on Iraq rather than Afghanistan because it was “doable”. In the lead-up to the war, he said that it was “wildly off the mark” to think hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to pacify a postwar Iraq; that the Iraqis “are going to welcome us as liberators”; and that “it is just wrong” to assume that the United States would have to fund the Iraq war. Who is this chief architect of the Iraq war?

7. On 23 September 2001, which US senator, who had pushed for the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that there was evidence that “suggests Saddam Hussein may have had contact with Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda network, perhaps [was] even involved in the 11 September attack”?

8. A 12 November 2001 New York Times editorial called an alleged meeting between Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi agent in Prague an “undisputed fact”? Who was the columnist, celebrated for his linguistic prowess, who was sloppy in his use of language here?

9. A 20 November 2001 Wall Street Journal op-ed argued that the US should continue to target regimes that sponsor terrorism, claiming, “Iraq is the obvious candidate, having not only helped al-Qaeda, but attacked Americans directly (including an assassination attempt against the first President Bush) and developed weapons of mass destruction”. Who is the professor of strategic studies at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, who made these spurious claims?

10. George W. Bush’s January 2002 State of the Union address described Iraq as part of an “axis of evil”. Who was Bush’s Canadian-born speechwriter who coined the provocative phrase?

11. “Yet whether or not Iraq becomes the second front in the war against terrorism, one thing is certain: there can be no victory in this war if it ends with Saddam Hussein still in power.” Who is the longtime editor of Commentary magazine who made this assertion in a February 2002 article entitled “How to win World War IV”?

12. Which Pentagon Defence Policy Board member and PNAC signatory wrote in the Washington Post on 13 February 2002: “I believe that demolishing Hussein’s military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk”?

13. “If we win the war, we are in control of Iraq, it is the single largest source of oil in the world… We will have a bonanza, a financial one, at the other end, if the war is successful.” Who is the psychiatrist-turned-Washington Post columnist who tempted Americans with this illusory carrot on 3 August 2002?

14. In a 20 September 2002 Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled “The Case of Toppling Saddam,” which current national leader claimed that Saddam Hussein could be hiding nuclear material “in centrifuges the size of washing machines” throughout the country?

15. “Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I’ll tell you what I think the real threat [is] and actually has been since 1990 – it’s the threat against Israel.” Despite this candid admission to a foreign policy conference at the University of Virginia on 10 September 2002, he authored the National Security Strategy of September 2002, which provided the justification for a preemptive war against Iraq. Who was this member of President Bush’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board?

16. According to a 7 December 2002 New York Times article, during Secretary of State Colin Powell’s efforts to negotiate a resolution on Iraq at the United Nations, this Iran-Contra conspirator’s role was “to make sure that Secretary Powell did not make too many concessions to the Europeans on the resolution’s wording, pressing a hard-line view.” Who was this senior director of Near East and North African affairs at the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration?

17. Who was Vice-President Cheney’s chief of staff, until he was indicted for lying to federal investigators in the Valerie Plame case, who drafted Colin Powell’s fraudulent 5 February 2003 UN speech?

18. According to Julian Borger’s 17 July 2003 Guardian article entitled “The spies who pushed for war,” the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans (OSP) “forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon’s office in Israel” to provide the Bush administration with alarmist reports on Saddam’s Iraq. Who was the under secretary of defence for policy who headed the OSP?

19. Which British-born professor emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, whose 1990 essay “The Roots of Muslim Rage” introduced the dubious concept of a “Clash of Civilizations”, has been called “perhaps the most significant intellectual influence behind the invasion of Iraq”?

20. Apart from their key role in taking America to war against Iraq, what do the answers to questions 1 to 19 all have in common?

Answers: 1. Albert Wohlstetter 2. Oded Yinon 3. Richard Perle 4. William Kristol and Robert Kagan 5. David Wurmser 6. Paul Wolfowitz 7. Joseph Lieberman 8. William Safire 9. Eliot Cohen 10. David Frum 11. Norman Podhoretz 12. Kenneth Adelman 13. Charles Krauthammer 14. Benjamin Netanyahu 15. Philip Zelikow 16. Elliott Abrams 17. Lewis “Scooter” Libby 18. Douglas Feith 19. Bernard Lewis 20. They are all Jewish Zionists.

All of these men place the interests of Israel over the United States.

http://uncensored.co.nz/2010/03/14/whos-to-blame-for-the-iraq-war-a-not-so-trivial-quiz/

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By JDavis – March 13, 2010

Andrew Bacevich: Lessons of Vietnam Revisited

Anti-Imperialist
Andrew Bacevich

Andrew Bacevich: Anti-Imperialist

Andrew Bacevich on international relations and foreign policy.

A friend writes:

I’m just back from Vietnam and Cambodia, after two weeks in Thailand. I imagine you would not recognize much anymore—but perhaps I am wrong about that. The famous hotels of Saigon that you may have known have all been redone, plus myriad new ones have sprung up. In a sense this “Communist” state is more capitalist than George W. Bush’s fondest dreams. People who were in Hanoi five years ago told us it had been a bicycle city then; now it is motor scooters—millions of them. And they are being added at the rate of thousands a month, even in a few days. That is the basic signature item of Vietnam’s youth culture—scooters and cell phones.

Government bigwigs are in on the bonanza of land values, because they know where investment will go next. Outside Hanoi—which remains an ugly stepsister to Saigon—huge factories have sprung up employing thousands of Vietnamese, who do not have labor unions to protect them, or unemployment compensation or good health plans supplied by the employer. And, we are told, the population which is 65 percent under 30, have little interest in politics. A major source of income for Vietnam comes from foreign remissions of the overseas Vietnamese—family members of the boat people. These funds will dry up, but tourism has become a major factor with more than 5 million Americans visiting last year. In addition, the U.S. invested (we are told) $10 billion last year.

A classic scene of the way Vietnam has gone would be China Beach and the Danang area—on the ocean side of the main road are (quite literally) miles of luxury hotels. Cemeteries have been moved, with a small compensation to families, who then can’t buy new houses because values have gone up. On the other side of the road, the ruins of the old airbase. And this is true of several of the cities we visited, Nha Trang, Dalat, etc. We had dinner at a luxury hotel on the beach at Nha Trang near Cam Ranh Bay—and it was out on the beach that could have been Hawaii. One entrepreneur purchased an island near Nha Trang for less than $100,000. Now his hotel and spa and the island are worth $7 million. People sunbathe while Vietnamese wait on them with cold drinks, and facial massages. Above you, near the beach, people soar off in hang gliders.

We had dinner in one of the newest luxury restaurants in Saigon….  I asked [the owner] if it was difficult to get permission to build and open up. Looking around he said, no, and indicated by gestures that it was money under the table. I did not see a single Vietnamese eating in the restaurant, but the waiters seemed very happy. The key to becoming something or somebody in Vietnam is to be found in learning English. That is crucial. You can’t fight your way up to the top without English.

Fifty years ago the operative assumption in Washington was that the Vietnamese people were incapable of managing their own affairs. To allow them to do so would yield dire consequences. Were the United States to step aside, the results would be twofold. First, in Southeast Asia, totalitarianism would surely triumph, with millions enslaved as a result. Second, according to the domino theory, that triumph would surely embolden America’s adversaries in the global Cold War, thereby endangering the security of the United States itself.

Faced with this prospect, Americans had no choice but to draw a line in the rice paddies and make a stand. So insisted several successive administrations and any number of pundits.

The woeful results of that insistence remain painful to contemplate even now.

Today, of course, presidents and pundits insist with equal assurance that various and sundry populations in the Islamic world—Afghans currently occupy the spotlight—are incapable of managing their own affairs. Further, were the United States to allow Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians, Pakistanis—the list goes on—to self-determine themselves, we would surely open up ourselves to attack, at least on the scale of 9/11 if not far worse.

So the United States finds itself engaged in a war that has gone on longer than the Vietnam War, with no end in sight. Much like their predecessors back in the 1960s, the Wise Men (and women) of present-day Washington are unable to conceive of an alternative to open-ended conflict on the other side of the world.

Although the discomfort that many Americans feel in recalling Vietnam is all too understandable, our present circumstances demand that we make the effort.

When the Vietnam debacle finally ended, discerning its “lessons” became for a time a cottage industry. Yet only now, decades later, are the war’s real lessons becoming evident. Two lessons in particular cry out for our attention.

First, peering across a vast cultural and historical divide to discern what it is that others “want” (or “need”) is exceedingly difficult. To imagine that American power, wealth, and know-how offer a neat recipe for reducing those difficulties is surely a delusion. American tutoring serves primarily to squander lives and money while annoying, if not altogether alienating, the subjects of our ostensible beneficence.

Second, allowing others to exercise real self-determination just might serve U. S. interests better than insisting that things be done our way. In Da Nang and Cam Ranh Bay, the Americans came and went, leaving behind a few ruins. Vietnam remains stubbornly Vietnamese. And yet when offered the chance, the Vietnamese take from us what they find useful for their own purposes. They choose, rather than having choice shoved down their throats. As a result, the Vietnamese people today have gained for themselves what American nation-builders once aspired to create: a dynamic, increasingly prosperous society that poses little threat to any of its neighbors and none to the United States.

Is the result a Jeffersonian democracy? Maybe not. Yet the outcome—which the U. S. war and all that it involved merely served to retard—works for the Vietnamese and works for us as well.

The Vietnam War was unnecessary and counterproductive. Is it not at least possible that the same might be said of the Long War as well?

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/new/blogs/bacevich/Lessons_of_Vietnam_Revisited

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By JDavis – March 13, 2010

The coming war with Iran for Israel to guarantee Israel’s nuclear monoply. It’s what US neoconservative ‘Israel First’ foreign policy is all about whether Bush or Obama.

The Nuclear Double Standard

Posted By Charles V. Peña On March 11, 2010 

Earlier this week, Israel announced its intention to pursue nuclear power to generate electricity. According to Israeli Infrastructure Minister Uzi Landau, Israel wants to achieve energy independence from coal, which it has to import in significant quantities:

  • “Israel is interested in being part of the circle of countries producing electricity from nuclear energy.”
  • “In a region like the Middle East, we can only depend on ourselves. Building a nuclear reactor to produce electricity will allow Israel to develop energy independence.”

Landau proposed that such a venture might be a joint project with one of Israel’s Arab neighbors (possibly Jordan, but Jordan says any such cooperation is premature and dependent on settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) and under the supervision of a Western power (perhaps France).  Currently, Israel has a research reactor open to international inspections and another reactor believed to have produced nuclear weapons.

It’s almost hard to know where to begin in terms of irony and hypocrisy.

First, the Bush administration demonized North Korea for developing a nuclear weapons program (the DPRK conducted its first nuclear test in October 2006 and a subsequent test in May 2009) and withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) – which, by the way, every country that is a signatory to the NPT has every right to do as the Bush administration chose to withdraw from the Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty because it thought it was in the U.S. national security interest to do so.  Yet there is no such hullaballoo over Israel having become a nuclear power (Israel, however, practices a policy of nuclear ambiguity, neither confirming nor denying whether it has nuclear weapons – yet it is generally accepted that Israel has such weapons) outside of the NPT (the same is true for India and Pakistan).  But if a premise of the NPT is that the world would be a better place with fewer, not more, nuclear weapon states, why is it OK for a country like Israel to essentially flaunt the NPT and become a nuclear weapon state?

More to the point, why does the United States not hold Israel to the same nuclear standard as it holds, for example, Iran?  Iran claims to be pursuing a nuclear energy program – much the same as Israel says it is doing.  Yet the Obama administration is considering even more sanctions against Iran because of concerns that Iran’s nuclear program might be for more than just energy (and in all likelihood is).  This is not to say that the prospect of Iran becoming a nuclear weapon state is a good thing.  But it’s hard to hold the high moral ground and claim Iran can’t develop a nuclear energy program (which it has every right to do, including uranium enrichment, as a signatory to the NPT) because we’re worried they might also be trying to build a nuclear weapon (a good bet), while at the same time allowing a country like Israel to develop nuclear weapons and engage in a nuclear power program.

Israel and Iran simply highlight the hypocrisy of a larger nuclear policy that endorses a double standard.  The United States, along with the other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (China, France, the Russian Federation, and the United Kingdom) are all nuclear powers.  Yet they want what amounts to the rest of the world, i.e., the other 184 signatories to the NPT, to not become nuclear powers – ostensibly because doing so would be dangerous and unsafe.  But why is it not dangerous and unsafe for the five permanent members to remain nuclear powers?  And as long as they are nuclear powers, doesn’t that create some incentives for other countries to become nuclear powers (if for nothing else, prestige and perhaps a desire to hold a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council)?  Moreover, how can we realistically expect the rest of the world to believe what amounts to the false promise of the NPT – that the existing nuclear powers will give up their weapons (so far, beyond rhetoric there is no real evidence that this is the case) in exchange for non-nuclear powers never developing nuclear weapons?

We assume that Israel’s nuclear arsenal is for defensive purposes (a reasonable enough assumption), which is at least one reason why we don’t threaten sanctions against Israel.  Put another way, Israel’s nukes (like the nukes of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council) are “good” nukes.  On the other hand, we assume that the only purpose for Iran acquiring nuclear weapons would be aggression – especially after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s statement that Israel should be wiped off the map (although a literal translation of his statement is that the “regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.”)  So Iranian nukes (much like North Korean nukes) are “bad” nukes.

Yet the North Koreans haven’t attacked anyone since becoming a nuclear weapon state, so why do we automatically assume Iran would?  Rhetoric aside, wouldn’t Israel’s nuclear weapons be a deterrent against Iran’s (ditto for the U.S. arsenal even though Iran does not have the capability to target the United States)?  Indeed, the regime in Tehran would have to be suicidal (for which there is no evidence) if it thought it could launch a nuclear strike and avoid retaliation.  And is also not unreasonable that Tehran might want to deter Israel’s nuclear capability?  Moreover, given U.S. proclivity for regime change (Q: What so Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein have in common?  A: No nukes.), it’s also not out of the question that Iran wants nukes to stave off U.S. military intervention.

Again, this is not an argument that a nuclear-armed Iran would be a good thing and that we should not worry about it.  Rather, it is simply to highlight the real difficulties of a nuclear policy that has a double-standard (that we conveniently ignore).  Despite President Obama’s vision of a world without nuclear weapons, the reality is that the United States will probably never divest itself of its nuclear arsenal.  Indeed, that arsenal acts as a powerful deterrent against other nation-states (not non-state actors) taking direct military action against America.  So there is good reason to keep it – although U.S. security can probably still be well served with fewer warheads.

But rather than continuing with a nuclear double-standard which only forces the United States to be hypocritical, we should adopt a more realistic policy based on U.S. security not some utopian vision of a world without nukes.  Of course, that may mean having to eventually accept and learning to live in a world with more countries that have nuclear weapons – even countries, like Iran, that we don’t like.  Yet we somehow managed to do that vis-à-vis the Soviet Union for more than 50 years.  And that didn’t turn out to be the end of the world as we know it.

Article printed from Antiwar.com Original: http://original.antiwar.com

URL to article: http://original.antiwar.com/pena/2010/03/11/the-nuclear-double-standard/

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By JDavis – March 12, 2010

The Rogue Nation

The Rogue Nation

Posted By Philip Giraldi On March 10, 2010 

In spite of the fact that the United States faces no enemy anywhere in the world capable of opposing it on a battlefield, the Defense budget for 2011 will go up 7.1 percent from current levels.  A lot of the new spending will be on drones, America’s latest contribution to western civilization, capable of surveilling large areas on the ground and delivering death from the skies. It is a peculiarly American vision of warfare, with a “pilot” sitting at a desk half a world away and pressing a button that can kill a target far below.  Hygienic and mechanical, it is a bit like a video game with no messy cleanup afterwards. The recently released United States Quadrennial Defense Review reports how the Pentagon will be developing a new generation of super drones that can stay airborne for long periods of time and can strike anywhere in the world and at any time to kill America’s enemies.  The super drones will include some that can fly at supersonic speeds and others that will be large enough to carry nuclear weapons.  Some of the new drones will be designed for the navy, able to take off from aircraft carriers and project US power to even more distant hot spots.  Drones are particularly esteemed by policymakers because as they are unmanned and can fly low to the ground they can violate someone’s airspace “accidentally” without necessarily resulting in a diplomatic incident.

Washington’s embrace of drones as the weapon of choice for international assassination is one major reason why the United States has become the evil empire.  Drones are the extended fist of what used to be referred to as the Bush Doctrine.  Under the Bush Doctrine Washington asserted that it had a right to use its military force preemptively against anyone in the world at any time if the White House were to determine that such action might be construed as defending the United States.  Vice President Dick Cheney defined the policy in percentage terms, asserting that if there was a 1% chance that any development anywhere in the world could endanger Americans, the United States government was obligated to act.  It should be noted that President Barack Obama has not repudiated either the Bush doctrine or the 1% solution of Dick Cheney and has actually gone so far as to assert that America is fighting Christianity-approved “just wars,” a position disputed by Pope Benedict XVI among others.  Far from eschewing war and killing, the number and intensity of drone attacks has increased under Obama, as has the number of civilian casualties, referred to by the splendid bloodless euphemism “collateral damage.”

Drones are currently killing people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.  It should be noted that the United States is not at war with any of those countries, which should mean in a sane world that the killing is illegal under both international law and the US Constitution. America’s Founding Fathers used constitutional restraints to make it difficult for Americans to go to war, requiring an act of war by Congress.  Unfortunately it has not worked out that way.  The US has been involved in almost constant warfare since the Second World War but the most recent actual declaration of war was on December 8, 1941. And then there are the special and clandestine operations that span the globe. Apart from Israel, no other country in the world has an openly declared policy of going around and killing people.  One would think that the international community would consequently regard both Tel Aviv and Washington as pariahs, but fear of offending the world’s only super power and its principal client state has aborted most criticism.  Most nations are resigned to letting assassination teams and hellfire armed drones operate as they please.  If Iran were operating the drones and bumping off its enemies in places like Dubai you can be sure the reaction would be quite different.

And it doesn’t stop there.  Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder has effectively blocked any inquiry into the use of torture by US government officials, mostly from the CIA.  The Administration claims to have stopped the practice but has declared that no one will be punished for obeying orders to waterboard prisoners, an argument that was not acceptable at the Nuremberg trials in 1946 and should not be acceptable now.  The United States is a signatory to the international agreement on torture and there are also both federal and state laws that prohibit either carrying out or enabling the practice, so the ruling by Holder is essentially a decision to ignore serious crimes that were committed against individuals who, in many cases, were both helpless and completely innocent.  It also ignores the participation of Justice Department lawyers and CIA doctors in the process, involvement that most would consider both immoral and unethical.  Worst of all, it lets off the hook the real war criminals, people like George Tenet and those in the White House who approved the practice.  Tenet, one recalls, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and a $4 million book deal.  He still teaches at Georgetown University.  Justice Department lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who made the legal arguments for torture are now respectively a tenured professor at Berkeley and a federal appeals court justice.  One assumes that the actual CIA torturers continue to be employed by the federal government or are enjoying a comfortable retirement.  So much for accountability for war crimes under President Obama.

Finally there is assassination.  On February 3rd Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair commented during a congressional briefing that the United States reserves the right to kill American citizens overseas who are actively “involved” with groups regarded as terrorist.  Involvement is, of course, a very slippery expression providing maximum latitude for those seeking to make a case for summary execution.  The death list involves a due process of sorts in that a government official makes the decision who shall be on it based on guidelines but it does not allow the accused to challenge or dispute evidence.  It should also be noted that no one in Congress objected to the Blair statement and the media hardly reported the story, suggesting that tolerance of illegal and immoral activity now pervades the system.  As former Reagan Deputy Attorney General Bruce Fein has commented, the claimed authority to suspend one’s constitutional rights overseas can be extended to anyone in the United States by declaring one an enemy combatant under the terms of the Military Commissions Act.  Jose Padilla was denied his constitutional rights to a fair trial even though he was an American citizen and was arrested in Chicago, not overseas.  Can we anticipate extrajudicial killing of American citizens in America as part of the war on terror?  Of course we can.

Three strikes and you’re out, Mr. Obama.  Your government stands for preemptive killing and missile strikes on people living in countries with which America is not at war, lets torturers and torture enablers go free, and has asserted the right to assassinate its own citizens anywhere in the world based on secret evidence.  Ronald Reagan once described his vision of America as a shining city on a hill.  Over the past ten years the shining city has become the ultimate rogue nation, pumped up with power and hubris in spite of the clearly visible signs of decline and moving inexorably towards a catastrophic fall.

Read more by Philip Giraldi

http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2010/03/10/the-rogue-nation/

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By JDavis – March 11, 2010

Will Be on a 10 day vacation

The Same Old Change website will be back around March 11,th.

Thank you for all the comments and kind words. Read some of the old article if you are of a mind.

Thank you -jd

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By JDavis – February 28, 2010